Outlook

It's a good idea to understand whether any external people have access to documents in your Office 365 tenant. There's no option on the Office 365 or SharePoint Online consoles to tell you what access external users enjoy to SharePoint sites, so we must use some PowerShell to interrogate SharePoint and see what that reveals.

Outlook.com (premium) now boasts two new protected email features taken directly from Exchange Online. It's an example of how the shared Office 365 infrastructure enables Microsoft to make functionality available to users of its consumer and enterprise platforms as they want. OneDrive Restore is another example. In both cases, the features aren't available to free seats.

Teams now hides the Office 365 Groups that it creates from Exchange clients (Outlook, OWA, and the mobile apps). That's as it should be for groups created for new teams. If you want to hide groups created for older teams, you can run the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet, but that soon becomes boring when you might have hundreds of groups to process. PowerShell to the rescue once again.

Outlook desktop includes Task and Contacts functionality that has not changed in years, which is why many users probably don’t use these client features. Mobile apps exploit Tasks and Contacts and make them much more usable.

Microsoft has released the Report Message add-in for Outlook 2016 to help Office 365 users report when spam arrives into Inboxes or messages are incorrectly treated as Junk. It's a good way to get information about new threats to Microsoft security researchers.

Microsoft has updated the Outlook apps for iOS and Android so they can now access conversations in Office 365 Groups. It's a good step forward, if only maybe to reduce the number of Office 365 related apps you have to install on a phone.

Outlook 2016 click-to-run desktop clients are now getting the necessary code for the Focused Inbox feature. It's a good step forward when a really important client is upgraded with an important feature, but you kind of wonder what's happening for the poor-old on-premises community...

There has never been a better time to address archived email data and reduce the costs associated with storing it on-premises. In part one of this series, Chris Goosen begins to walk you through the 5 phases of an archive consolidation or elimination project.